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Sins
of the Father By Bob Fisher • Photos by Francois Duhamel
The director and cinematographer were both recognized for their efforts with Oscars. Members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences also chose American Beauty as the best film of 1999. It was Hall’s second Oscar and ninth nomination. He previously took top honors for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. His other nominations were for Morituri, The Professionals, In Cold Blood, The Day of the Locust, Tequila Sunrise, A Civil Action and Searching for Bobby Fischer. Hall’s personal history has a storybook quality. He was born in Papeete, Tahiti, and raised on the island in a cloistered, literary environment. His father was James Norman Hall, who co-authored Mutiny on the Bounty, Men Against the Sea, Hurricane, and Botany Bay with Charles B. Nordhoff, and wrote various other novels. The novelist sent his son to the University of Southern California with instructions to find a career. Hall briefly struggled with journalism, but soon shifted his interest to filmmaking. The rest is history. Hall has literally become a legend in his own time. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographers in 1993 and the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 1995 Camerimage International Festival of the Art of Cinematography in Poland. Road to Perdition opens a new chapter in his storied career. Mendes has a diametrically different background. He was born in England, where his father was a university lecturer and his mother authored children’s books. After graduating from Cambridge University, Mendes began his career as a theatrical director. He made a quick impression. In 1987, Mendes received the Critics Choice award as Best Newcomer to the British stage. He subsequently directed plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 1992, Mendes was appointed artistic director of a London playhouse where he directed revivals of The Glass Menagerie and Cabaret. American Beauty was his first effort at directing a film. It proved to be an auspicious beginning of a new phase of his career. Mendes was chosen as director of the year by 18 film festivals and critics groups in addition to winning an Oscar. “We often talked about doing another film after we finished American Beauty,” Hall says. “One day Sam called and asked if he could send me a script. He knows how I feel about violence, so Sam told me that it was a Mafia story, but the violence wasn’t gratuitous. The truth is the story didn’t initially appeal to me as much as American Beauty. I didn’t see an opportunity for humor. But Sam is a marvelous dramatist whom I trust completely, so I said I wanted to shoot it.”
The story is based on a serialized, graphically illustrated novel that David Self adapted and scripted as a screenplay. The film is a co-production by DreamWorks, SKG and 20th Century Fox, produced by Mendes and Dean and Richard D. Zanuck. I saw the illustrated book on the walls in Dean Zanuck’s office, and there were balloons above the drawings of characters that said, ‘bam’ and ‘pow,’” Hall recalls. “It’s a very dark story about a 12-year old boy who is curious about what his dad does for a living. He tries to ask questions, but his parents aren’t forthcoming. One night he follows his dad to work. It turns out that Michael Sullivan is an enforcer for the Irish Mafia. The boy witnesses his father brutally murdering several people.” That traumatic experience sets the stage for a series of dramatic twists and turns which spiral out of control. The bad guys decide the boy can’t be trusted to stay quiet about the killings. They decide to kill the Sullivan family. Their plot goes awry when the hit man they send only kills the mother and the other son. Sullivan is consumed by his need for revenge, but he is also determined to protect his son and guide him onto a different path than his own. Interesting sub-text plays out between various characters on the periphery of the story, but the core of the film is about the complex relationship evolving between Sullivan and his son.
“Sam is a very visual director,” Hall reflects. “By the time I came aboard there were wonderfully detailed storyboards. Sam also gave me books to read and crime photos that were supposed to be taken by Jude Law in the movie. The pictures were horrific. They were taken with a wide angle lens looking straight down at the victims.” Gassner also had the walls of his office decorated with annotated period photographs and pictures taken at the various locations that had already been scouted. Hall also got a first look at Albert Wolsky’s period costumes. “They were wonderful,” Hall remembers. “Even the textures help to define the period. Unfortunately, the audience doesn’t see much of the costumes, because a lot of the story takes place outdoors at night in the winter, with people wearing overcoats.” The dark mood is defined by what Hall describes as “the game of life and death that the Mafia played in order to stay in power.” Hall and Mendes made a matter-of-fact decision to record Road to Perdition in Super 35 format (2.4:1 aspect ratio), the same as American Beauty. Hall explainsthat they envisioned using the wider frame for composing images, and that he prefers spherical lenses over anamorphic, because they are more compact and react to light differently. “I thought carefully about how to make this picture special in terms of the visuals,” Hall says. “I remember a meeting with Sam and Albert, where we spoke about the look. Sam didn’t want bright colors. He wanted dark greens, grays and blacks, and maybe dark brown. He didn’t want any reds, bright yellows, whites or anything like that. We had costume tests where I played with hard light smashing down on the fedora hats people wore, and got wonderful slashes of light on faces in the shadows of brims.” The sum of the visual planning added up to a relatively bleak look that was appropriate for both the mood of the story, and also for the 1930s, wintry settings in Chicago. That includes many night exterior scenes, frequently filmed in the rain. “I decided to work wide open (frequently at T1.9), because that created the somewhat softer palette I wanted to achieve without many points of focus,” Hall says. “It’s not like Citizen Kane where everything is in sharp focus. We intended to shoot scenes where both the foreground and background were slightly soft with only one plane where the characters are in sharp focus.” His camera package from Panavision included a Platinum Panaflex body, mainly Primo Prime lenses and occasional zooms, used when Hall wanted a longer focal length to isolate a character or object in a scene. He also carried a Panastar camera, which he used for situations where a second camera was appropriate, and also for slow motion compression of time, including the scene where the boy sees the killings.
Hall chose a relatively modest canvas for recording images. He used the older, 100-speed Eastman EXR 5248 film to record all daylight exterior scenes, and the newer 500-speed Kodak Vision 5279 film for interiors and night sequences. [The following scene didn’t make the final cut of the movie, but it is still worth describing because it provides important insights into Hall’s thinking.] After his son witnesses the shooting, Sullivan is driving him home. The boy is asking anguished questions. Sullivan is attempting to comfort and rationalize why he does what he does, but the boy is so disturbed that he doesn’t want to be with his father at that moment. He jumps out of the car and runs into the forest abutting the road. Sullivan chases after him. Hall covered that sequence with a 240-foot long tracking shot through the rough terrain. There were as many as five grips pushing the dolly on the track, simulating running through the rugged area. The son trips and Sullivan catches up with him. Sullivan speaks softly, trying to ease his son’s concerns in a fatherly manner. There are icicles hanging off the trees all around them, glistening in the artificial moonlight. Hall emphasizes there was nothing fancy about the lighting. He had lamps on big cranes sending shafts of soft light through the trees. It created a magical environment as the setting for an important conversation between a son and his father. “Like any movie, the visual language is complex,” Hall says.” Each scene requires its own palette. There is a lot of darkness, and a lot of things that I chose not to light. Sometimes we just have an image of a face against blackness, where you don’t see the background at all. It’s a brief, stark sensibility that is almost shocking. You have to be on top of your game and play it right by deciding what to do on every shot.” One scene during the beginning of the film follows the boy coming home from school. He is passing through various industrial districts to help establish the setting. In scenes like this, Hall usually chose to work with a single camera, which enabled him to be more specific about composition. In general, he stayed close to the visual concept depicted on Mendes’ storyboards, but he always had the freedom to follow his instincts and respond intuitively to “happy accidents” while they were shooting. “There are always times when a gaffer turns a light on, it bounces off of something and you get an unanticipated result that adds something to your scene,” Hall explains. “You trust your instincts and go for it. It’s the same with my crew. If an assistant or operator has an idea, I take it very seriously.” There is an establishing scene early in the story, where the younger Sullivan son is coming home from school and he passes a bread line with cold and hungry people waiting for a handout. Hall felt that was an appropriate time to use multiple cameras and use wider-angle lenses to capture the scope of the scene, which contrasted with the opulent settings in the Looney and Sullivan households. After the boy’s mother and brother are killed, Sullivan goes on a crime spree, robbing banks where Capone has money deposited. Sullivan hopes that will convince the Mafia leader to surrender the killer whom he is hiding. Mendes and Hall depicted this sequence as a montage with a series of images that flow clockwise from left to right, depicting a number of bank robberies with the son driving the get-away car, spiriting his dad off to safety. One location for this series worked perfectly, but in the wrong direction. Gassner was unable to find a more appropriate period street, so he simply reversed all of the bank and street signs, the position of the steering wheel in the car, etc., and they flopped the film. While fleeing in a hail of bullets in another near catastrophic sequence, Hall used a handheld camera that is jerking all around to amplify the action and feeling of panic in a heated confrontation following their escape. “The yin and yang of cinematography is about where to put the camera, should it stay still or move, what to light and what not to light,” says Hall. “Is it better to go in or is it better to pull back to get the emotion you want? If I felt really strongly about something that deviated from our plan, I’d tell Sam. He usually listened. We are story tellers, and we don’t do it just with words.” For conversations in cars at night, Hall made effective use of “poor man’s process shots” on the armory stage with moving lights and shadows amplifying the illusion of movement. The illusion is accentuated with noise simulating rain pounding the surface of the car. There are times when scenes in the car are meant to take place on a country road where there are no streetlights, and passing cars and houses are few and far between. In that situation, Hall used the glare of the dashboard to motivate light, with very small units hidden in the areas of the gearshift and visors at the top of the front window. There is an interesting visual effects shot completed by Cinesite that composites several elements. Sullivan and his son are driving into Chicago in the early morning. The car moves toward the camera in traffic and slides past it. Sullivan is driving and the boy, who has been sleeping in the back seat, is awakening. The boy is marveling at the tall buildings reflected in the windows. The camera pulls back, rising and panning as the car moves across the Chicago River and into the financial district. The Technocrane is tracking alongside the car while it drives on LaSalle Street across the bridge near the downtown financial area. The illusion was composited into the windows by the visual effects team led by Mike McAlister. Ted Andre did the compositing. There is a parade of vintage cars passing by in both directions. Hall notes that as many as 500 costumed extras and 250 vintage cars were used to help establish the period. “It’s so hard to explain what you do, because so much of it comes from feelings you have about the story, the mood, and what’s happening to the characters,” Hall contends. “When I get behind the camera, I’m like a painter and the ground glass is my canvas. I’m always wondering whether I’m doing too little or too much.” Much of what a cinematographer does is intuitive, based on how they see imaginary worlds in their minds. Hall likens it to storytelling with moving pictures instead of text printed on the pages of a book. However, there is also the experience factor. Each picture adds a little bit more ammo into each cameraman’s arsenal of visual logic. There are a few shots where Hall used mirrors to re-direct light intended for other purposes to add a layer of contrast. He made only sparing use of that technique, which was an important part of his palette on Searching for Bobby Fischer. Hall explains that mirrors got foggy in the winter climate. Hall says that Road to Perdition was a physically grueling movie to shoot. He and the crew would awaken at 5 a.m. and drive, often in traffic, to a location or stage that was regularly 60 miles away. The weather determined if they were shooting at locations or on stages. Gassner was constantly breaking down old sets and putting up new ones, because there wasn’t sufficient space for them to be left standing. Frequently, Hall saw the week’s dailies on Sunday afternoon, because there wasn’t sufficient time during weekdays. That made his trust in Phil Hetos, the color timer for CFI Labs, more important than ever. Hall says the camera was almost always moving, and describes some “magical” Steadicam shots executed by Scott Sakamoto. “We did some very intricate shots, sometimes starting outside and walking into a building through six, seven or eight rooms,” he says. “There is one scene that takes the audience into a speakeasy, past barrels filled with illicit hooch, slot machines and other gambling, people dancing and drinking, walking right into Nitti’s office. The trick is not to overdo it. You have to be an artist and an athlete to do 15 takes of that shot, and he was both.” Hall also lauds the rest of his crew, including David Golia on second camera, assistants Clyde Byran, Suzanne Trucks, Rick Sobin, Matthew Haskins and film loader Peter Picchietti. Hall points out that the assistants were responsible for holding critical focus while working wide open on moving shots, frequently using the Panavision remote focus and T-stop control device. He also praises his gaffer Tom Stern, who is now a director of photography shooting his second film, and Bill Young, his grip. Hall emphasizes, “The crew helps me just like I help the director. We all help each other, because that’s what it’s about. It’s not about making a movie for yourself. It’s about telling the story that was scripted the way the director wants it done.” Hall chose not to use any special techniques with filtration, diffusion, smoke or other atmosphere. He didn’t want to degrade the quality of images by putting extra glass in front of the camera lens, partly because there is an extra optical step required to make release prints in Super 35 format. At first, Hall says he couldn’t imagine shooting a story about Mafiosi without atmosphere, but one of the main actors couldn’t tolerate smoke, so that plan went by the wayside. Ideally, Hall says he would have liked to shoot this film in black and white, but that wasn’t possible. Early in pre-production he suggested using a bleach bypass process to heighten the drama and accentuate the sense of time and place. They shot a couple of tests during preproduction, and Hall asked Hetos to periodically use the bleach bypass process on a few sequences throughout production. In every instance, Hall felt it gave them stronger imagery. For instance, there were no blue reflections from the sky on the snow covering the ground in some scenes. As we went to press, Hall wasn’t certain whether Mendes would decide to use the bleach bypass process for release printing. The director also had Hall color time the trailer for release on the Kodak Vision Premier print film as an alternative to bleach bypass. In conclusion, we asked Hall to reveal a secret. How does he manage to shoot film after film, and make every one of them an original work of art? His answer: “I don’t know about a work of art, but to do good work as a story teller, you must stay a contemporary human being in every way, so you can communicate with audiences through images they will feel and understand on emotional and intellectual levels, and that doesn’t mean aiming for the lowest common denominator.” • |
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Road
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Road
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“It’s
more excruciating in slow motion,” Hall explains, “drawn out in order
to make it more horrific. The boy is looking through a crack between
the floor and a closed door. We had a handheld camera shooting from
his point of view. When the gun is fired, he witnesses what happens
in slow motion. At first, all he can see is his dad’s shoes and the
bottoms of his cuffs on either side of the frame. The boy tries to look
up, but he can’t see his dad. There is a sudden tremendous cacophony
of noise created by a gun going off at close range, and a rain of shells
slamming against the floor inches from his eyes, where his dad is standing.
We cut to the boy’s eyes, which are enormous, and then back to his point
of view. The boy can see dead people lying on the floor. The close-ups
are very powerful. We shot at 48 and 96 frames per second, and let them
decide in the cutting room which takes the bigger emotional toll.”